Trophic Interactions

• Plant-herbivore-predator-detritivore multi-trophic interactions: How do above-ground grazing food webs and below-ground detritus food webs interact and feed back to each other?

• Mechanisms underlying the diet compositions of consumers: What are the roles of resource availability, resource attractiveness and preference, energy and nutritional requirement, foraging behavior and hunting mode, immediate and potential predation risk, and developmental stage in determining dietary patterns of consumers?

• Plant-herbivore arms race: Can morphological, physiological, physical, and chemical trait matching between plants and herbivores predict the degree of herbivory?

• Ecology of various types of plant defense mechanisms against herbivores: What biotic and abiotic factors determine the relative importance of physical vs. chemical, direct vs. indirect, and induced vs. constitutive plant defense?

• The role of consumptive vs. non-consumptive predator effects on predator-prey interactions: What are the relative strengths of density-, physiology-, and behavior-mediated trophic interactions in governing predator-prey population dynamics?

• Multiple drivers of direct and indirect non-consumptive predator effects and landscape of fear: How can we integrate resource landscape, thermal landscape, evasion landscape, and encounter landscape to predict non-consumptive predator-prey interactions?

• Plant-herbivore-predator tri-trophic triangles: How can we shift from the traditional chain-perspective of plant-herbivore-predator tri-trophic interactions to the modern network-perspective of tri-trophic triangles?

• Intraguild predation, omnivory, and cannibalism of organisms: What are the patterns of intraguild predation, omnivory, and cannibalism in different types of ecosystems and their impacts on food web dynamics?

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